Tuesday, July 29, 2014

FPGA Vs ASIC

This has become the most
prominent discussion in VLSI industries and amongst VLSI engineers that if
FPGAs can overtake the ASICs or not. FPGA is considered as a substitute of the
ASIC and various research and development teams are working on proving it, but
certain parameters are kept into consideration before making such comparisons
in the technology i.e. performance , flexibility , power consumption and cost of
the device.

If we talk about an FPGA then
there is no doubt that it’s a revolutionary product if it can be proved an
alternate to the ASICs as it has faster time to market because it is
independent of the manufacturing steps like masking and layout etc. One just needs
to burn the codes on readymade FPGA kits and we are done.

Apart from that there are some
more factors on which FPGA beats an ASIC viz. reusability, design cycle, logic
density and field programmability. An FPGA can be reprogrammed at no cost basis
and a second is more than enough to reprogram an FPGA but an ASIC can take
thousands of dollars and a bunch of time to reprogram or it cannot be
reprogrammed.

There are a number of facets
where FPGA lags behind an ASIC such as power consumption, limited design size,
not fit for the production in bulk and most importantly the cost of an FPGA kit
is much higher than an ASIC which helps an ASIC to put behind an FPGA as cost
is the most prior and vital factor for an electronic industry.

Now, when the discussion goes
round about then if isolated the manufacturing steps and cost then an ASIC
would be of great use and vitality for the VLSI industry and for whole
electronic industry. ASICs can be produced in bulk and operates at very low
power compared to FPGAs and due to design flexibility of an ASIC it gives an
enormous speed than the FPGAs, but the tools required for the designing of
ASICs are available at higher or mammoth cost.

The fact cannot be neglected that
even if the FPGA replaces an ASIC then what really is an FPGA made up of?

It is only an ASIC which is
comprised in an FPGA kit. So, without an ASIC we cannot even think of the
FPGAs. Every technology has its own merits and demerits but the real technology
is what meaningful we extract from that particular technology that can be used
for the welfare of humans and others.